IF YOU HAVE HOPE FOR REAL CHANGE – THEN VOTE GREEN PARTY – ROW H [New York State] ON ELECTION DAY, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH.

The Green Party candidates for president and vice president, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, are an historic ticket.These two women of color, a former six-term Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia and a journalist and founder of the National Hip Hop Caucus have teamed up to bring a message of peace, democracy, justice and ecological sanity to the 2008 national elections.

Never in recent history has the momentum and engagement in a presidential race been at this level, but registered voters and Obama volunteers are not the only numbers that are at a record high.So is the gap between rich and poor. Foreclosures have risen dramatically. Unemployment is on the rise. Our planet is in more danger than ever before.

Why should you vote for McKinney and Clemente on the Green Party line?

Because both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will continue to spend precious resources – our young people and our money – on war and the military.McCain will bomb his way to “victory” in Iraq while Obama will redirect resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Neither candidate has a convincing plan to control emissions.And both support new coal and nuclear power plants.

The Green Party candidates, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, will drastically cut military spending, stop the building of new nuclear power plants and implement a bold plan that will provide real oversight and control over the Wall Street robber barons.

By voting GREEN this Election Day you’ll be saying:

YES to total withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan!

YES to universal, single-payer health care!

YES to national living wage!

YES to reducing emissions to 25% by 2020

YES to renewable solar power and wind energy!

YES to a crackdown on corporate crime!

YES to ending the drug war!

YES to restoring Constitutional civil rights!

YES to abolishing the death penalty!

YES to electoral and campaign finance reform

YES TO PEOPLE’S NEEDS AND NOT CORPORATE GREED!

Here in New York State, the Green Party is the only party that runs candidates who adhere to these values– your values.When we encourage you to vote for candidates on the Green Party line – you can be sure that what our candidates say and do is based on our party’s platform.

While both the Democratic and Republican candidates have spent record breaking amounts of money on this election from big corporate donors and special interest groups, the Green Party takes no corporate donations. So please show your support by making a secure donation on line at gpnys.org [if you are in New York State].

Vote Truth 08 – Vote McKinney/Clemente – Vote Green Party Row H! [If not in NYS, check if the McKinney/Clemente ticket is on the ballot in your state; if not, ask your poll worker to instruct you in casting a write-in ballot for the Green Party ticket.]

We all know the old dance: it’s a very ancient and corrupt American custom. In an election year, two candidates of the same mainstream party bitterly contest the primaries. Each tries to make the case that to vote for the other guy or gal would be tantamount to destroying the country. To attain the Holy Grail of the party’s nomination, each candidate puts her/his opponent through a process seemingly designed not only to make him or her lose, but to sully that candidate’s professional and personal reputation beyond repair. And when the dust settles and one candidate emerges victorious, the defeated candidate suddenly forgets that the opponent is Evil Incarnate and for the sake of something called Party Unity casts aside all pretense of consistency, integrity and self-respect, shifting the axis of evil to the standard bearer of the other political party and embracing the new nominee and former enemy as a long lost buddy, with whom he/she has never had any ideological differences worth talking about (this last part, sadly, is almost always true).

But one major party candidate this year refused to perform this insane dance. Texas Congressman Ron Paul fought hard against John McCain during the Republican primaries, disagreed with him on practically every issue, and was ultimately buried by the McCain juggernaut. But he refused to play the game. He was much too principled, too committed to his core beliefs — of which McCain is the very antithesis — to compromise. So when the call came from his fellow Texan, Phil Gramm (by the way, isn’t Gramm not supposed to be working for the McCain campaign anymore?), with the message, “You need to endorse John McCain,” Ron Paul politely but firmly said No.

As the good doctor later described it, the demand was not quite as bullying as it may sound. Knowing well his colleague’s stubbornness, Gramm tried to make the argument in terms of his, Paul’s, self-interest. McCain, Gramm claimed, was going to cut taxes more than Obama, so logically the Republican candidate would do “less harm” than the Democratic one. But the congressman knew that to cave in now to GOP pressure would be to betray everything he’d worked and voted for in his career. Besides, as he would later remark, “I don’t like the idea of getting two or three million people angry at me.” The decision was not a difficult one.

But his next decision may well have been. Instead of fading into the night as the glare of the media spotlight moved on to McBama, Dr. Paul chose to be a beacon of true democracy. No longer a candidate himself, Paul called a press conference at the National Press Club on September 10th to bring attention to third-party candidates and thus shine a light not only on all the crucial issues that the two frontrunners refuse to tackle, but on the extent to which our democracy itself has been snuffed out by the single corporate party with two heads and its media lapdogs.

He invited to the press conference Independent candidate Ralph Nader, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, Libertarian candidate Bob Barr (who for reasons of his own declined to appear) and my own candidate, Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. Amazingly, the three politicians who showed up and Dr. Paul — despite their numerous and strong ideological differences — agreed on a four-point statement of principles, opposing:

A foreign policy that commits the US to disastrous foreign wars like the one in Iraq, which destroys lives and depletes our treasury;

The erosion of our constitutionally-protected civil liberties, including the Patriot Act, the approval of torture and the FISA bill;

The runaway growth of the national debt, which creates an intolerable burden for future generations; and

Corporate bailouts and the untrammeled power of the Federal Reserve system.

Dr. Paul in his presentation was gracious, modest, eminently reasonable. He deplored the “lesser of two evils” psychology which leads citizens to vote for people of whom they do not approve. He urged people not to waste their vote on politicians and policies in which they don’t believe. He also deplored the mainstream media and its obsession with “lipstickgate” and other nonsensical “issues.”

Then the candidates each got up to speak. Though they are united in their conviction that the system must be changed, each presented a different point-of-view. My candidate, Cynthia McKinney, reminded people of the Four Pillars of the Green Party: Peace, Social Justice, Ecological Wisdom and Grassroots Democracy. She remarked that when she left the Democratic Party, she “declared [her] independence” from an unjust system, a “politics of conformity and control.” She added that we engage in politics “so we can have power over public policy.” Politics is, after all, the “authoritative allocation of values in a society,” and that only a tiny minority of Americans now have their values affirmed in this society, wheras most of us have our values affirmed “practically none of the time.” She urged voters to “declare [their] independence” from the current system.

It must be said in truth that I disagree, and in some cases strongly disagree, with some of Ron Paul’s views. But I cannot help but admire his patriotism and integrity, as well as a virtue almost unheard of in politicians today: courage. Thank you, Dr. Paul!

Isn’t it ASTOUNDING how, as soon as the Republicans are themselves caught displaying the frailities and foibles — like drug addiction or sexual excess — that they constantly condemn in others, they suddenly become raving liberals?

Why Is This Girl Smiling?

Why should we care when an utterly unqualified Vice Presidential candidate suddenly and proudly presents us with her knocked-up teen daughter as an anti-abortion and pro-abstinence (!) role model?

Why Is *This* Girl Smiling?

The case for ignoring this whole mess is perhaps best put by Brian Alexander of MNSBC:

War in Iraq, economy imploding, energy transformation finally on America’s agenda, income disparity threatening the social order, cynicism infecting every corner of American life, a tectonic shift to a multi-polar world, a collapsing educational system, and you want to make the pregnancy of a 17-year-old a political issue?

Well… yes! Because the Republican Party — led by the fascist wing of Pat Buchanan and others like him — made, over the past two decades, their savage culture war on everyone private morality the defining aspect of contemporary politics, from Monica Lewinsky’s stained dress to Elliot Spitzer’s blazing crash and burn. Their cries of pseudo-moral outrage overwhelm the sustained and sober thought necessary for Americans to deal rationally with any of the problems enumerated above — or to realize that the Repugs themselves, least of all Sarah Palin, haven’t a clue about how to solve any of it.

The tragedy behind this farce is that there really is a qualified candidate for President who does have ideas about what to do about our problems, but because of a total media blackout, you may not even have heard of her. She is Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party and she is the perfect embodiment of the Ten Key Values the Greens espouse:

Grassroots Democracy

Social Justice

Ecological Wisdom

Non-violence

Decentralization

Community-based Economics

Feminism

Diversity

Responsibility

Future Focus

(We apologize to the Christian Right that “Chastity” is not among them.)

Yes, indeed, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for V.P., is certainly babealicious! (One thing we know about McCain is that he has a keen eye for the ladies, as his first wife, who was an invalid when he cheated on her post-Vietnam, discovered long ago.) But what about slightly more pressing qualifications for Vice President, like intelligence, talent and knowledge of the world? We think McCain missed his big opportunity here. We believe that Big John chose the wrong Palin. He should have picked Michael Palin!

Michael Palin, Comedian, TV Writer, Filmmaker, World Traveler

Everybody, of course, remembers Michael Edward Palin, CBE, as perhaps the funniest member of that wonderful group of zanies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But he is much more than that! As the creator of an acclaimed series of travel documentaries, Oxford graduate Palin is truly a man of the world. Whereas Sarah Palin, like our current Fearless Leader, probably couldn’t find the Himalayas on a globe, this man has actually been there and made a mini-series about his experiences. Thus, he would have been uniquely qualified to bring both wit and gravitas to the GOP ticket – qualities that the Republicans need desperately. There’s also the sex-appeal factor: once voted the best-looking Python, Palin has had rapturous female fans literally faint in his arms. So Michael’s allure for female voters would have been at least as strong as working mother Sarah Palin’s could ever hope to be. Of course, there’s the awkward fact that Michael would have been constitutionally ineligible for the job, having gotten himself born in England, in some godforsaken place called Ranmoor in Yorkshire (wherever that is). But since when has either establishment party let a technicality like the Constitution get in its way? After all, not a single American war since 1945, including our current misadventure in Iraq, has been legally sanctioned by a formal Congressional Declaration of War, as Article One of the US Constitution requires. Compared to that violation, choosing a non-American as Vice President would be, as the Brits themselves say, “small beer.”

Also, in choosing the young, unfledged Governor of Alaska as his running mate, John McCain has proven yet again that he’s just another lying bastard politician. After swearing up and down that he would choose the smartest and best-experienced person for the job, to whom does he turn? A first-term Governor of a state incredibly remote from the centers of power. A woman whose most impressive pre-Gubernatorial experience (moose-hunting aside) is having served as mayor of a town so tiny it makes Cicely — the fictional small town of the TV series Northern Exposure — look like Chicago by comparison. A politician who actually asked, in a TV interview, “…what is it exactly that the VP does every day?” and then had to hear her interviewer patiently explain, “It’s a pretty big job, Madame Governor… You’d be surprised by how big the veep job is these days!” Since McCain, if elected, would be three years older than even Ronald Reagan was when he was elected, one would think that the problem of selecting the best person to stand “a heartbeat away” from the most powerful office in the world would be somewhat more pressing for him than the average candidate. But today no consideration – none – trumps the Machiavellian demands of power politics.

The big lesson of this electoral season, in fact, is that you can’t believe a word that comes out of any establishment candidate’s mouth. Consider the following:

Obama, after countering accusations of lack of experience with the unarguable claim that good judgment, such as voting against the Iraq War, trumps mere experience ever time, selects as his running mate the old war hawk (and hack) Smilin’ Joe Biden, who not only voted for the war, but served as chairman of a committee, in the run-up to the war, that held a “sham hearing,” refusing to call for testimony from dissenting voices like that of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and all but rubber-stamping Bush’s mad decision. (This crime is compounded by the fact that, as mentioned above, going to war was not even Bush’s decision to make, but Congress’.)

Hillary Rotten Clinton, after her unprecedented betrayal of her party in the primaries – when she bluntly declared that her “friend,” the Republican’s presumptive nominee, was more qualified to be president than her primary opponent – has now totally reversed herself, claiming that not only is Obama fully qualified to be president, but that McCain (who is still her “friend”) has become the “twin” of the utterly incompetent George W. Bush.

McCain and the Republicans, after fifteen years of vilifying Hillary Clinton as the devil’s spawn, for all the wrong reasons, now shed crocodile tears of sympathy over her supposedly heartless treatment at the hands of the Democrats. (The last time I checked she was beaten fair and square, probably because of her support for the war, though I guess we’re not supposed to mention that.) They are so sad about this, in fact, that they want to make it up to the women of America by nominating their own “strong feminist candidate” as V.P. – a smiling cipher whose political judgment is even more dubious than Clinton’s. The craven, lying mainstream media is already calling Governor Palin a “maverick,” though she’s more of a standard-issue Repug than even her running mate: both “pro-life” and pro-death penalty – what the Lord giveth, the State taketh away – and, of course, pro-Iraq War and anti-Iran, she even supports drilling in ANWR.

But who is the worst, most pathetic liar of all, worse than Clinton, Obama or even McCain? The American Voter, who constantly lies to himself/herself, in the crazy belief that all these professional liars will suddenly start telling the truth once they get into office.

Meanwhile, there is a presidential candidate who has consistently told the truth: Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. She was right about the Iraq War. She was right in her suspicions that Bush was warned about 9/11. She is right about universal healthcare. She is right about the government’s shameful treatment of Katrina victims. The definition of insanity is to make the same choice over and over again and expect a different result. This year, choose sanity. Vote Green!

In my previous post, I quoted the Green Party presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney, in her Denver speech at Recreate ’68, talking about how the Democratic Party leadership took impeachment off the table, despite the Bush Administration’s many crimes, even those “against Nature itself.” So the question of the day is, Is the Bush Administration, by its very existence, a crime against nature? If we recognize that human beings live in a delicate balance with the rest of the natural world, and that we are, at our peril, fatally upsetting that balance, we can say without question that George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney are the two biggest criminals against nature on the planet, in their slavish whoring (and warring) on behalf of Big Oil and their obscene raping of environmental legislation and enforcement for the benefit of their corporate buddies and the great god Profit. Future generations will surely curse their names.

But it must be remembered that this regime did not inaugurate the destruction of Planet Earth. That has been a bipartisan project for some time. And when we look at the Democratic nominee and the presumptive Republican nominee, and listen to their statements about energy, it’s not hard to see that they have, to a greater or lesser degree, every intention of carrying on the Bush criminal tradition. That is because both are beholden to the Profit god and neither will blaspheme against it by declaring that America should, instead of drilling for oil or building nuclear power plants or exploiting “clean” coal (whatever that is), rethink the whole issue, with the recognition that only by tapping sustainable energy sources will we make human survival possible in the long run.

So we need a Cynthia McKinney — who (like all Greens) does not accept corporate money, who sees the Profit god as a false idol, and who has focused all her energies solely on helping her countrymen and the whole planet survive — to tell the truth and to bring morality back into politics. Because what the politicians of the mainstream parties (both of them) are doing to us is far nastier than anything Monica did to that good ol’ boy, Bill Clinton.